I was reading on my kindle the other day and a co-worker who has been thinking about getting his first ereader asked: what got me started reading ereaders to begin with.

"Well I'll tell you" I said "I have always been a rather voracious reader and the number of books in my library was getting a little out of hand, in fact they were threatening to take over the house. So I took to electronic reading out of necessity in an attempt to retain some living space in my home rather than letting the books take over the whole house."

Like you I had a large library of books. I have one room that is a library. One large closet is all book shelves. I have books and book cases in office and I even have books in book cases in my store. I love to reread books and it was taking me an inordinate amount of time to find specific books.
I also liked the fact that my whole library could travel with me.
Apache

I wanted one when the Sony 500 was released. I waited til after Amazon released the Kindle, and then bought my husband one that summer. He was getting the Wall Street Journal delivered at the time, and when he was traveling they would just pile up in the house. I canceled that, and got him the subscription on the Kindle. A few months later, the Kindle did the Oprah discount, and I got one for myself. It took me a few months after that before I stopped using the local library and went 100% ebook.

I've always wanted to have books with me, used to have one or another ratty paperback in my purse. In the mid 90's I discovered fanfic. Hated reading off of the computer monitor for medium to long stories, and it was too expensive to print them out.

When I got my first monochrome Palm Pilot, and found software that let me put fanfic on it, I was in hog heaven. Then I went searching for other fiction, and grabbed what I could.

I've been carrying a library with me ever since, in one way or another.

Mine was because of space, or lack thereof, in my house. I always was going on ebay and buying books by the box load. Too many books when it came to moving. Then I heard about ereaders and the rest is history.

I actually had to think about it for a few minutes before I remembered - it was because of Harlequin. I had previously gotten ebooks on Fictionwise waaay back in the day, but ereaders weren't even a blip on my radar then. It was definitely Harlequin that got me into the current ebook world. From there, Amazon, and ended up with a Kindle. While waiting for it to ship, I came here and got schooled on what I was getting into, just a few months shy of two years ago.

A library at my fingertips. Obscure, hard to find books are now easy to find. I can set the font what size I want. I never have to contend with old yellowed paper. I thought that I would dislike e-readers, because I don't like reading on a computer screen. But once I picked up an e-reader, I wanted one.